President Obama's appointment of William Daley to be his new chief of staff ignited a flurry of punditry, with commentators trying to figure out whether this would pull the White House to the left, or the right, or wherever. Personally, it reminded me of a crack that The Economist magazine once made about Chicago politics.
Politics in the Windy City, said this British scribe, reminded him of politics in Thailand, which is to say they were entirely practical and almost totally non-ideological. To the Thais, he said, it made no difference whether the king or the army or some other force held power, so long as they wielded that power reasonably competently. Power, in short, counts for everything, ideology for nothing.
Ditto with Chicago, he said. The Daleys are Democrats and so is almost every office-holder in the city, but this tells you nothing about the ideology of the place. City Hall is tight with local business people, most of them presumably Republicans. So long as the snow gets shoveled, everybody's happy.
If this pragmatic approach is true of Mayor Richard M. Daley, it's even more true of his younger brother Bill, now off to Washington to run the Obama White House. It's almost impossible to predict now what politics Bill Daley will recommend to Obama, but any lurch to left or right seems unlikely. What can be predicted that he will do well whatever the president wants him to do.
Bill Daley has been a government official in the past but mostly he's a businessman. (Full disclosure: he's also a board member here at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.) Until he took the White House job, he was chairman for the Midwest for JP Morgan Chase, which made him rich. In an earlier incarnation as president of SBC Communications, he pushed for light regulation on broadband. At Chase, he oversaw heavy lobbying against Obama's Wall Street reforms and consumer protection program, including a new separate consumer protection bureau. But as the Chicago political analyst Don Rose (no great admirer of the Daleys) has written, "perhaps that can be excused because he was being paid to do so. It was business."
Daley was President Clinton's special counsel and, then from 1997 to 2000, secretary of commerce. In the first role, he shepherded the passage of NAFTA through Congress. The treaty was negotiated by the first Bush administration, but Clinton assigned Daley to get it through a suspicious Congress and Daley got the job done.
This business background, plus his help in passing NAFTA, makes it easy to portray Bill Daley as a Trojan Horse for business inside the White House, pushing Obama's agenda even further to the right. As with all things connected to the Daleys, this ideological picture is probably too simple.
Back in 2007, Daley wrote an interesting op-ed page article for the Chicago Tribune, objecting to a columnist's contention that Democrats oppose trade. He noted that he and Clinton, both Democrats, pushed NAFTA through Congress. But then he said that, while trade is beneficial, many aspects of globalization are hurting working Americans, creating "a growing sense of inequality and insecurity."
"The undeniable fact that globalization has reduced the prices paid by every American for almost every type of good simply does not counterbalance the loss of a job, or a shift to a lower-salaried job," he wrote. Jobs are disappearing, especially in manufacturing and especially in the Midwest, he said, while wages for average workers are barely creeping up.
"For decades, Americans accepted greater exposure to international competition because the benefits led to higher living standards for the middle class," he said. "But now, the number of voters who believe globalization is a significant cause of wage stagnation and job insecurity has become politically potent enough to undermine the bipartisan consensus for free trade." As evidence, he cited a Chicago Council poll showing falling public support for trade.
The traditional safety net for workers harmed by globalization is "simply inadequate," Daley wrote. Otherwise, both voters and politicians will turn against trade.
On the one hand, this is a businessman who believes in trade and wants to keep political support for it. On the other hand, this is a politician shrewd enough to scorn the simplistic all-trade-is-good-for-everyone platitudes of many businessmen and economists and to know that, among workers who have to live with the realities of trade and globalization, these platitudes ring hollow.
In other words, Daley is not about to reject globalization, but he's smart enough to tell his fellow businessmen that, if globalization is going to work, it has to work for everyone.
As Don Rose wrote, "Bill may truly be the quintessential Chicago power guy........flexibly centrist, of no identifiable ideology." This no doubt is one reason he appeals to Obama, himself much more of a centrist than his liberal backers ever supposed.
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